As if calculating overtime pay wasn’t challenging enough at times, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) can throw even a seasoned payroll manager into a tailspin at 300 miles per hour. Why do FLSA mistakes cause so many issues for payroll overtime processing? In this article, we will look at some ways you can avoid the common issues with managing overtime payments in regards to FLSA guidelines.

Startup businesses are some of the most exciting ventures to be involved in but they bring with them unique challenges and many, many lessons to learn along the way. Some of the toughest things to handle are staffing your company, managing personnel and handling compensation. Given the fact that a single person or even the business owner typically handles compensation, there can be some hurdles to jump over as you navigate your way through managing compensation in a startup.

Is there anyone … anyone at all… who either likes writing performance reviews or receiving performance reviews?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Still, there’s no reason to compound the pain by introducing common errors into the review that render it much less effective than it would have been otherwise—that’s pain with no gain. (My apologies for the cliché.)

The question of whether or not the federal minimum wage is fair is one that has been tossed around quite a bit in the last several years. The resurgence of this question has largely been due to political scenes heating up and major layoffs leading more people to obtain minimum wage jobs but it’s a topic that has been debated since the first minimum wage was put into place in 1938, guaranteeing workers 25 cents per hour. Though the federal minimum wage has increased significantly over the years to the $7.25 per hour rate it is now, the hard questions about minimum wage still remain. Chief among them is whether or not the $7.25 per hour employers are required to pay their employees is actually fair.

Employees with putrid attitudes who won’t and don’t follow instructions are a real drag on workplace productivity, because even if they’re kind of, sort of doing their jobs, the effort required to manage them relative to their output is a sorry bargain.

Have you recently expressed concerns around employee retention? As the New Year approaches, many employees may be considering a resolution that includes a quest for better pay, especially if they’re starting to become aware of possible inequalities when it comes to pay.

A company’s culture, or personality, is a very big deal. Just as an individual’s personality can be a help or a hindrance to meeting certain personal goals, a company’s “personality” can be a help or a hindrance to meeting certain organizational goals.

We’ve talked a bit about social transparency – the dawn of a new social media age in which previous ideas of privacy seem to be rapidly changing. While many of us seem more than happy to share just about every aspect of our lives online, one component still remains taboo for many – salary.

PayScale recently hosted a three-part webinar series all about Compensation Budgeting, presented by yours truly. Part one was all about managing pay inequities. Part two taught attendees all about raises, and part three showed how to pull it all together using PayScale Insight. If you missed any of the webinars, you are welcome to view the recordings. Since this is a topic of interest to so many of our Compensation Today readers, we're posting my answers to many of the questions received after the webinars here. Enjoy!

Performance reviews are typically a source of dread and stress for employees. They tend to be very critical, one sided and vague, leaving very little of value for employees to take away from the evaluation. However, they are a necessary part of growth and development, both for your company and the employee as an individual. Performance reviews establish expectations, review job performance and provide direction, all of which contribute to the success of your company. However, there is another side to performance reviews that often gets overlooked: what the performance review does for the employee.

Everyone loves to rag on Millennials (born between 1977 and 1990), and we’ve all heard the complaints. Millennials are lazy. Millennials are spoiled and entitled. Millennials have no ambition. And so on.

Get out your party hats – it’s the annual holiday season! This time of year signals a time when employees eagerly look forward to what the company has in store for them. Like little kids in a candy shop, they wonder if they will they get another turkey from the boss again this year, or does he have something else up his sleeve – like a bonus check?

As Obamacare officially launched across America this year, new requirements forced employers to look for ways to boost their compensation and benefit programs without raising healthcare premium costs. The new law permits employers to use as much as 30 percent of each worker’s health care premium on wellness incentive programs (up from 20 percent last year). The challenge to find cost-effective ways to maintain the well-being and productivity of workers is on.

It’s a fact. Each year businesses face too late what happens when employee morale drops and the best begin to leave for greener pastures. This most often occurs when the leadership team forgets that there is a fine line between recruiting and retaining high performance candidates. It’s a sad state of affairs that is completely preventable, with the right efforts and planning.

Despite the recession being officially over, the media are still reporting about the great number of underemployed Americans—Americans who either don’t have enough paid work or whose jobs require significantly less qualification than they possess. CNBC recently reported that 17.2% of the workforce is underemployed.

Generally we think of the underemployed as those in fairly menial positions doing repetitive, low-skilled work for low pay, and that’s one face of underemployment, for sure.

However, even a highly skilled, well-paid employee can be underemployed if his abilities and knowledge aren’t consistently put to good use.

One of the hardest things to overcome when you’re attempting to hire employees is doing so with no budget. For many small and non-profit organizations, it’s a reality that there’s no money to dedicate to recruiting. Whether it’s because there just isn’t enough to go around or because you’re only responsible for hiring for a few positions and money is allocated to larger scale hiring, many of us are faced with doing the impossible: hiring employees on a $0 budget.

For Human Resource departments, the end of the year signals the time for performance reviews and salary planning for the New Year. This can be a challenging time, when the HR team and payroll managers must coordinate their efforts to produce a compensation strategy that helps make the company profitable in the coming quarter.

Move over corporate America – here come the Millennials! Human Resource managers everywhere are baffled by the onset of a workforce that’s a lot harder to keep motivated and engaged at the office. It should come as no surprise that Millenials, also sometimes referred to as Generation Y, are a challenging group of employees to keep inspired at work. While their predecessors, the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers start to move out of entry level roles and into their more mature career phases, Millenials are moving in and it’s creating quite a problem for old-school HR departments.

Forecasting is a skill that is highly marketable because of the value it brings to an organization. There is no area where this rings more true than in budgeting, where it is both tricky and vital to forecast accurately. It requires a solid understanding of the past, a grasp on the current position of the organization and an ability to utilize those factors to peer into what the future will hold.